UCLA

I argue that Black contemporary poetry disrupts ideas of linear progress and neat conceptions of subjectivity. The poets I am thinking with explicate the complexities of Blackness that cannot fit neatly into the formulation of the modern liberal subject. I utilize Hortense Spillers’ framework of the American grammar in her essay “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book” along with other Black feminist thinkers and literary theorists to explore Black contemporary poetry’s capacity for moving beyond the grammatical impulses of “the human.” This project will add to an already rich and growing field of Black thinkers rejecting humanism as well as exploring the boundaries of tension between what is and what is not considered formal poetry. First, I look at rapper Tierra Whack’s 2017 song “Mumbo Jumbo,” which I argue utilizes incomprehensible sound to gesture towards an alternative to the American grammar. In my second section, I analyze Evie Shockley’s poem “Sex Trafficking Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl in the USA (Or the Nation’s Plague in Plain Sight)” from her 2017 book semiautomatic as disrupting time through her re-appropriation of language. Finally, I read Douglas Kearney’s poem “SWIMCHANT FOR NIGGER MER-FOLK (AN AQUABOOGIE SET IN LAPIS)” from his 2017 edition of THE BLACK AUTOMATON as utilizing both sound and the written to depict the all-encompassing violence of grammar towards a new alternative.